A beautiful game
by chibiness87
Summary: She always did love to play. Eurus introspective piece, leading to the events of TFP. One shot. (take two)


**A beautiful game** , by **chibiness87**  
 **Rating** – T  
 **Spoilers-** anything and everything  
 **Disclaimer** \- not mine.

 **A/N:** I have attempted to write a few pieces from Eurus POV – this is the one that seemed to work best. Not beta'd, all mistakes are my own.

A/N 2: Second attempt at posting this...

* * *

Eurus Holmes is born into a family brimming with intellect, and rife with stupidity.

She masters the art of writing by the time she is two, and starts correcting the spelling of her elder brother by the time she is three.

Her parents, used to but so new at bringing up a child with a special understanding of the world, introduce her to music on her third birthday, presenting her with her first Stradivarius, and by the time her fourth birthday comes around she has started teaching Will.

She loves to play.

Bach speaks to her more than any other composer, the way his music flows through her veins a welcome sense in a world full of riddles. So enthralled is she with him, she tries to show Will, to teach him what makes so much sense to her. But Will doesn't understand, he doesn't _get_ it, and while the notes are there the feeling is not, and she throws her violin down in disgust; refuses to play with him again until he learns to stop _performing_ Bach, and start _playing_ him.

Will has a friend; something that pleases yet upsets her at the same time. Because this friend, this Victor, keeps calling Will by a funny name, one that is his yet is not, and he keeps insisting Will use this middle name, because that's what Victor does, and it sounds _better_.

Sherlock is a funny name and it isn't her brother, it isn't _Will_.

She tries to tell Victor that, tries to say how _Will_ is his name, his _identity_ , but Victor cuts her down. Tells her she's stupid. Tells her she doesn't understand. Then her brother appears, and he and Victor go off into the fields around the house, calling each other even more stupid names. Redbeard and Yellowbeard, and swishing fake swords around like idiots.

Like children.

She had thought her brother was better than that.

Was brighter.

She complains to her mother, her father. She even, after they ignore her protests, complains to Mycroft.

But whereas her parents dismissed her concerns out of hand, Mycroft suggests she might feel better were she to _join in_.

It is a foreign concept, but one she finds, once she thinks about it, will not leave her alone.

After all, she does love to play.

And Will, he loves puzzles.

The riddle takes her about ten minutes to compose, then the tricky part comes.

Well, she thought it would be tricky.

Turns out, Victor is trusting and easy to coerce.

It takes Will about 15 minutes to work out his friend is missing. And she watches on, waiting for her him to ask her, to include her, but he doesn't. He asks mummy, and father, and Mycroft. But he doesn't ask her.

But she wants to play. Wants to be included. So she sings her song, and Mycroft looks at her, and mummy looks at her, and father, but Will doesn't look at her. Doesn't ask her.

So she sings it again.

And again.

Mycroft asks what she's talking about, as does mummy.

Will though, Will looks at her, and then picks up a shovel.

He's getting it wrong; he doesn't need a shovel.

She sings the song again, trying to get him to _see_.

But he still doesn't ask her where his friend is.

And then it starts to rain.

It rains and it rains, and it doesn't stop.

Mummy calls Will in, and when he doesn't come she goes and gets him. He is pulled, kicking and screaming, into the house, and this, this isn't her brother.

This isn't Will.

She can hear mummy trying to sooth him, calling his name over and over, but Will is shouting back. _That's not my name. My name is Sherlock. I'm Sherlock._

Ignored by everyone, Eurus runs and hides in her room, tears brimming.

She just wanted to play.

The pens are sitting on her desk, and she pulls them and some paper towards her. Soon, her parents will remember her. Soon Mycroft and Will will come, and they'll play with her.

She knows it.

She does.

But she wants Will to play with. Will, not Sherlock.

Sherlock is not her brother.

Sherlock needs to die.

The drawings she makes are crude, rash. Full of pain and anger, if one knows how to read such things. And underneath each one, she writes RIP Sherlock.

She just wants her brother back.

But her parents, mummy and father, and then Mycroft, they see the pictures, read the words, and then they get it _wrong_. They don't understand what she's saying, and they try to take them away. But Eurus, she's smart. Smart where everyone else is merely clever, and she burns them before they can take them away.

Only.

Only the fire spreads, and the house is old, and then the house is on fire and they are outside and in blankets, and she… she didn't mean it. She didn't mean to burn the house. She just wanted her brother back.

Mummy's brother takes them in that night, and, for reasons she doesn't understand, she tells him. Tells him about Will and how he wanted to be Sherlock, and how she didn't mean to set the fire.

Uncle Rudy smiles at her, promises her everything will be ok.

And she believes him.

When the doctors come the next day and take her away, she looks at him first, the uncle who said it would be ok, looks at him with betrayal on her face and sadness in her heart.

He is the smartest man she has ever met, and even he doesn't understand her.

The hospital she is taken to is boring.

The walls are boring and the food is boring and the lessons are boring.

Boring, boring, boring.

She knows everything they try to teach her already, and often finds herself teaching herself new things instead.

Like how the body actually works.

Muscles and tissues and nerves, all connected. All working together. She's not trying to hurt herself. Doesn't want to die. She just wants to understand.

The fire is an accident.

She didn't mean it.

Uncle Rude comes, and takes her away.

Gives her a new place to stay, and puzzles to keep her occupied.

But the people bringing her the puzzles are more fun than the puzzles themselves, and she takes her time to learn. To find out how the body, the mind works. It takes years until she is satisfied. And then she uses the knowledge against them all.

Rudy is found one night, dead, with no apparent cause.

They mark it down as heart failure, and that is that.

Mycroft comes then. Grown up and _important_ now, with a job in the Government, he takes over her care. Moves her to a facility far away from anywhere. Keeps her quiet; keeps her hidden.

Gives her puzzles, cases, people to work out.

Deduce.

She was always good at puzzles.

And then, through the whispers of the walls, she hears tale of a man who likes puzzles too.

Likes to set them, likes to test them out.

Likes to play.

Eurus has always liked to play.

She makes Mycroft a deal; for her to continue to do his job for him, the stupid man that he is, she wants something in return.

A Christmas present.

She has so missed Christmas presents.

James Moriarty is magnificent.

If he wasn't so easy to play, they could have been such good friends.

But his interest is so childish. So petty.

He wants to bring down the world's greatest mind, he tells her, not realising the greatest mind is right in front of him. And then he says the words that deal his fate. Not that he knows it yet. He says he wants to take down Sherlock Holmes.

It's obvious then, that James doesn't understand.

Doesn't see.

You don't bring down a man like Sherlock Holmes.

You have to kill him. Maybe then, she'll get her brother back.

But not until he knows the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

This is something she needs to remind dear, sweet Jimmy boy about with immediate effect when she finds out he has her brother at gunpoint while said brother is threatening to blow everyone up.

Will was always so impatient.

It's one of the reason's he could never play Bach. He was always rushing to get through to the end.

She manages to make the call in time, and everybody lives to see another day.

Just over a year later, Jimmy eats a bullet while Sherlock performs a swan dive, and everybody dies.

Well, that's what the world thinks, the world believes.

She knows better.

She did, after all, come up with nine of the thirteen scenarios that could have occurred. Even named them.

She's especially fond of Lazarus, the hidden meaning behind the word.

After all, she always did like to play.

In the aftermath, she watches. She observes. Everyone who knew him is in mourning for her brother, or at least the mask her brother portrayed. Everyone, that is, except one.

The pathologist.

She's good, Eurus admits. Nods in the right way, cries in the right places, all with a hint of a secret about her. One which everyone else is too stupid, too blind to see.

When her brother returns in a blaze of glory just over 20 months later, saving the world from a gunpowder plot so full of holes it's a wonder there was any left by the time he got to the bomb, she keeps her eye on how the world reacts.

Shock, and awe, and anger.

But from the pathologist, only relief.

It makes, Eurus thinks, for the making of a wonderful game.

Because while the world is looking at how everyone reacts, she is also looking at him.

He is glad to be home, relieved. But Eurus spots the way his eyes linger on the pathologist for just a moment too long. The twitch in his fingers when she is near.

There is something there, something that wasn't before. An awareness.

A longing.

A hope.

Whoever this small woman might be, Eurus knows what her brother wants her to be. And her brother has always been led by his emotions.

Even if he pretends he doesn't have them.

She's his sister; she knows better.

And then his best friend gets married, and he turns to drugs, and gets a fake girlfriend and a fake engagement and really actually shot.

Even Eurus didn't see that coming.

Trapped in her cell, she is forced to watch as the paramedics come and take him away. She hears later, through a tired, worried Mycroft, that he has survived. But only just. Was too stubborn, Mycroft says, to die on the table, even if he did give it a damned good go.

Her brother is becoming reckless, and this is something that must be addressed.

When news comes in a few months later that the recklessness has turned to stupidity, she knows, she _knows_ she must take a more active role in his life. Otherwise, he'll die, and the mystery, the first mystery, the one he doesn't even _remember_ yet, will stay unsolved forever.

The first time she sneaks out of her cell, it is with baited breath. Only for the thrill of the escape to be damped almost immediately by the ease of it all.

Christ, she didn't even have to fake a swoon.

What idiots does she have, guarding her?

The second time, she is more daring. Makes it into a game.

She always liked to play.

By the fifth time she has escaped her cell, she has worked out the shipping lanes and supply runs. It is merely a hop, skip and a jump for her to stowaway, and then she is free to plant the seeds.

The video is easy, and the panic it produces a wonder to see.

Becoming a therapist is child's play, and then she meets _him_.

Sherlock Holmes, the man her brother has become.

And oh, he is magnificent.

Wonderful.

Such intellect, but such turmoil.

No wonder the pathologist likes him.

Setting up the cameras is easy, directing the stream even more so. After all, Mycroft owns the airwaves; she's simply tapping in.

Her brother nearly dying on a drug bend wasn't in the script, and she really needs to address this saviour complex he seems to have developed. The guilt has been there since he was a child, unable to save Redbeard.

Apparently Redbeard is a dog now. How… disappointing.

The tranq gun, she admits to herself, even as she pulls the trigger, is more for fun than anything.

And then the game truly begins.

* * *

End

Thoughts?


End file.
